The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Data processing systems commonly offer the capability to search for items in a database and display result sets of items that match a particular search query. In some systems, users can designate an item as a favorite item or an item in a wish list. However, presently known systems do not provide easy-to-use mechanisms to share the contents of a favorites list or a wish list with others who are not using the same data processing system. In some systems, when a first user wishes to share her favorites list or wish list with a second person, the second person is required to log in to an instance of the same data processing system or online service. Typically the second user must have a pre-existing account with the service or on the system. Consequently, sharing the lists is cumbersome and may involve an excessive number of steps for the second person.
Still other systems represent items in a wish list or favorites list using text labels, text descriptions, or hyperlinks that are within a web page containing many other elements. In the context of mobile computing devices such as tablet computers, interacting with these types of lists is difficult because a large number of information elements are displayed for each list item. In addition, visualizing the entire list may be difficult.